Sunday, September 09, 2007

09:49 PM CDT on Saturday, September 8, 2007

Even the dog walkers in Highland Park seem to know where George and Laura Bush will be moving when they leave the White House in early 2009.

"They're building a house on a piece of property around the corner," said a young woman, pointing south of Beverly Drive as she struggled to control two oversized golden retrievers.

"It's going to be a big pain in the neck with the Secret Service there all the time," she predicted of the president's future abode. "When Dick Cheney visited a home in the neighborhood last spring, even the owners couldn't get to their houses."

***

The location of the president's future home has become the biggest guessing game in town.

"We've been told five or six locations by people who leave cocktail parties, where everybody is talking about it," said George Patterson, Highland Park's top administrator, who professes to know nothing.

The only public confirmation that the Bushes will move back to Dallas comes from a simple quote attributed to the president in a book released last week.

"We'll have a nice place in Dallas," Mr. Bush told Robert Draper, author of the book, Dead Certain, which also noted the president's plan to run a "Freedom Institute" in Dallas that would promote democracy around the world.

***

Of course, it's entirely possible the Bushes have not even started their search for a new home in the Dallas area, which means that this guessing game has only just begun.

About Me

OBAMA FACTCHECK

I'm asking you to believe not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours. -Barack Obama

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.~ Sir Stephen H. Robertshistorian, 1901-1971

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."